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Big Momo

August 18, 2010

It’s apt that our accidental and unofficial Truffaut week here should coincide with today’s launch of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of the films of Eric Rohmer, given the artistic and personal links between the two filmmakers and between the two critics that they were beforehand. (The series begins today at two-fifteen with a great rarity, Rohmer’s first feature, “The Sign of Leo,” from 1959, which I write about in the current magazine.)

Truffaut and Rohmer met (according to the biography of Truffaut by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana) in the summer of 1949, when Rohmer was twenty-nine and Truffaut was seventeen. Rohmer—rather, Maurice Schérer, who took “Eric Rohmer” as a nom de cinéma—was then a French teacher, a published novelist, an influential film critic (whose remarkable early works—published in translation by Carol Volk in a wonderful book, “The Taste for Beauty,” foreshadow the feature films he’d eventually make), and the leader of the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, which was a key meeting place for those who would make the New Wave. Rohmer (known to his friends as Momo, short for Maurice—and as “le grand Momo,” because he was tall) published Truffaut’s first critical works in 1950 in his short-lived but crucial Gazette du Cinéma. At Cahiers du Cinéma, founded in 1951 (Rohmer was on the editorial board), Truffaut’s 1954 article “A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema,” the famous attack on the mainstream of French cinema, made him and the magazine notorious and got him a prominent gig as critic for the high-circulation national weekly Arts, where he was able to disseminate the critical line and get his friends—including Rohmer—freelance work.

According to Truffaut’s biographers, Rohmer, Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette formed the key trio that then spearheaded the movement at Cahiers that would become the New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard, the first of the bunch to write for the magazine, was in Switzerland at the time and didn’t move back to Paris until 1956). Truffaut, the youngest of the group, was its practical leader; Rivette was its tastemaker; Rohmer was its theoretician. The only one of the group to have a substantial formal education, he was deeply rooted in the modern arts and, through his writings as well as his personal influence, staked out a claim for the cinema—and, in particular, the best of the Hollywood cinema—as a crucial aspect of modernity and, indeed, as the modern art form par excellence—and one that is built, naturally, upon the mighty edifice of artistic culture that preceded it.

This is one reason that Rohmer’s films seem slighter than they are: Rohmer understood the cinema to be the tip of history’s artistic iceberg or the top of its tree, which suggests all that it grows from and is connected to—and reaches above. He practiced (as Truffaut eventually would, in a different way) an art of reticence, of personal expression by way of allusions and suggestions. Here he is, writing in 1949:

How strange it is to proclaim Chaplin the most authentic genius of film! Let’s salute Murnau, Stroheim, or Dreyer as our true masters. Beware of all winks to the audience, of the sly quest for complicity, of all calls, even discreet, for pity. We must learn to keep our distance.

And Rohmer learned to keep his distance, but there’s fire at the heart of his reserve, and the best way to see his films is to look for the wild man contained, even constrained, beneath their placid yet taut surfaces.

P.S. Godard, earlier and later, was a theoretician too. But if Rohmer was the New Wave’s Hegel, weaving a historically informed dialectical web that both defined and constituted modernity—and, in some ways, limited it—Godard has been its Nietzsche, who, writing with literary brilliance and aphoristic passion, delved as deeply into the tradition to commit a creative destruction that would bring about a new yet fearsome freedom—by means of which to restore and renew that tradition in his own image.